Why should businesses blog? You need to blog, because the digital world is not one where you can “sell” products in the first instance. People come online predominantly to search for information. Therefore, the more information you are able to put out on your site, dynamically fresh and relevant to your audiences and your brand, the more your chances of being in the path of these information seekers who may eventually turn into your customers.

A blog post is not like an advertisement that directly tells your customer what your brand is about. A blog post indirectly attracts your customer to information he may be seeking that is somehow within your brand’s area of interest or expertise or knowledge. By supplying this information free to the information seeker, your brand can hope to build a regular reader-relationship with the information seeker, and eventually gain his trust to buy your products from you.

In the history of blogging lies the reason why you should use it for your brand!

When blogging first started as a trend, it was more like a daily diary that some people wrote on their
websites, just to air their views or express themselves. In fact the word “blog” derives from the term
“web log” (in other words, a kind of logbook of musings that random people maintained on their
websites, and added to every day).

But what made online marketers sit up and take notice was that these daily opinion pieces from
bloggers seemed to be entertaining, engaging and informing a lot of others. Casual readers started
showing eagerness to read these installments of wisdom (or mind-dumps) from their favorite authors
– and even became ardent “followers”.

While all this was happening, it was also coming to the notice of marketers that whenever they tried to
sell their products to anyone online it invariably was met with frostiness. People were congregating to
blogs but running away from any form of advertising.

This is where “content marketing” dawned as an idea to marketers. They started exploring the idea of
covertly advertising to their target audiences by providing daily doses of insightful, engaging or
interesting information that would evoke a “following” – and eventually lead people to ask: “Who is
this person writing so wonderfully on this topic?” … and lo and behold, the brand or business behind
the blog would reveal itself to the reader’s consciousness, and then start its “selling process” with
subtlety and finesse.

This is how blogging for business became a marketing tool. Today, it has evolved to such sophisticated, nuanced version of its earliest existence.

The image below shows a comparison of how blogs began their life online, and how far they have now come …

Visibility and traffic are the lifeblood of your web presence. If you had a website that did a good job of never surfacing for air in this large pool called the Internet, it would remain the world’s greatest secret. That would be like kissing goodbye to any prospects of business.

Blogs, which are like daily articles published on your website, are the stuff that indicates that your website is a living, breathing entity, worth a look in, because there’s information dissemination activity happening all the time. Blogs help remind your traffic that you exist, and how you can serve them, and how good an information source you are. Blogs attract traffic to your site in three distinct ways:

Each blog pots you write becomes one more indexed page on your website. It creates one more opportunity for you to show up in search engines, in organic search, on the search results pages … and when people click through on your link, it drives traffic to your website. It also alerts Google and other search engines that your website is active, and they should be therefore be sending their search bots to your site in frequently to see what new content to surface.

2. Business blogs help drive traffic from the social media.

Business blogging also helps you get discovered via social media channels. Every time you write a blog post, you can create excerpts of it as updates for the social media channels such as Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn or Facebook. You’re thus creating smaller content that people can easily share on social networks which helps expose your business to a new audience that may not know you yet.

Business blogs need to be more than just about the business or company. If they provide greater value to the goings-on of the industry they belong to – writing about the industry, reviewing products, providing company and competitor news, and commenting on various business and economics issues – a business blog becomes a ready source of news stories of PR value. Unlike a journalistic piece of news-analysis, where the topic is often more important than the author, in a blog post the curiosity about :”Whose opinion is this?” make a a lot of difference. So writing about the happenings in and around your business burnishes booth your product brand and your personal brand as the owner or spokesperson of the business.

3 thought-leading opinions on why business blogging is crucial to marketing!

To make your website a valuable marketing asset, you need people to actually see it. Other than people just typing in your website’s URL (which is pretty unlikely to happen for most businesses), there are a lot of ways people can see your website — and one big way your website can be found is through search engines.

The more pages your website has, the more chances you have to rank in search engines. The problem is, you don’t just want to throw up random web pages all over your site. That would be a terrible user experience, and your site would quickly become a total mess. Business blogging is a solution to that conundrum. Every time you post a new blog post on your website, you have a new web page on your website, and it’s all housed under your blog so your website doesn’t get cluttered with pages here, there, and everywhere.

What is a blog? A blog is an easily updatable website comprised of posts (entries, updates or articles) that are usually displayed in reverse chronological order. While many people mistakenly call each new entry a blog, the correct terminology is post or blog post. Think of a blog like a magazine. Magazines contain articles, and blogs contain posts.

Who is a blogger? A blogger is someone who uses a blog as a platform to share their unique viewpoint on a particular topic.

A business blog is company-promotional. Let us rephrase that. A typical business blog is company-promotional–highlighting the latest products and services available from that company. A remarkable business blog is industry-promotional–highlighting the latest news and concepts related to the company’s field.

We’ll get into the nitty-gritty of what makes a business blog remarkable later on. For now, just know that when we talk about a business blog, we mean a blog that is hosted on a company’s website, for the ultimate purpose of generating profit for that company. To get an idea of what a good business blog looks like, check out Business Insider, Fast Company, and The Huffington Post.

This article is incomplete without your input!

What are your thoughts on this topic? What do you think business blogs are – or should ideally be? Your thoughts could inspire others, so do share by adding your comments below.

What to read next …?

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This is a very informative and helpful post, very honest and practical advise. Thank you so much for a detailed post. It’s very helpful for all .Specially this complete information will be helping to all. Thanks!

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I can help entrepreneurs accelerate growth by enabling their brands to rise sublimely above the market, with least effort and maximum buoyancy. At the heart of my strategy is power-blogging, which I believe is the master key for digital entrepreneurs looking for brand growth at the cutting edge.

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